Video: Exploring Oregon’s hidden lava caves

I’ve been doing housework and research for my novel today, so I’m sharing a video I found about lava caves. For a bonus, we have a glimpse into the work life of a cave explorer, which appears to be one of the most terrifying jobs in existence. I don’t consider myself claustrophobic, and I’ve been in a few caves – including some that got pretty tight.

But those caves had had people go through them many, many times before, and there was no way I would have been in them had they not been safe. Exploring unknown caves, and wedging myself through a passage that could just keep getting smaller? No thank you. It would terrify me even if I hadn’t read Junji Ito’s horror comic The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Personal discomfort aside, I’m glad that professional cavers like Ken can show us these places I’m too afraid to explore, and get fulfilment from doing it.

 

Air pollution is bad, whether you’re a WASP, or a wasp.

When people discuss the decline in insect populations, the biggest culprit, unsurprisingly, is the over-use of insecticides. Agriculture isn’t the only area where that’s a problem, but it’s probably the biggest. Farmers around the world have developed alternative methods of pest control, including the nurturing of predators and parasitoids. Probably the most infamous failure of this method has been the Australian cane toad debacle, but I think my favorite version comes from cranberry bogs:

https://unauthorizedrhapsody.tumblr.com/post/630276104230518784/why-do-they-always-show-cranberries-in-thos-big

I’m sure PZ has been tempted to take up cranberry farming, but I dunno how well I’d fare with wolf spiders on my face. This post really gets at the essence of the technique – the spiders are fellow workers. That attitude is very much how I think we should be viewing most of the rest of life on this planet, so while it needs to be done carefully (see the cane toad documentary I linked above, if you haven’t), I think it’s a brilliant technique.

The problem (you knew there was going to be a problem, didn’t you?) is that unless we actually take a systemic approach to change, those people trying to do better in the context of our current, destructive system, are being undermined by that system. I’ve talked before about how air pollution is bad for humans, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it’s bad for other critters. Specifically, diesel exhaust and ozone cause problems for parasitoid wasps used to protect plants grown for vegetable oil (apologies in advance for this article being about the worst-named plant in existence):

The team, led by scientists from the University of Reading, used special equipment to deliver controlled amounts of diesel exhaust and ozone to oilseed rape plants. They also added aphids to the plants and measured the reproductive success of parasitic wasps that habitually lay their eggs inside a freshly stung aphid.

Dr James Ryalls, University of Reading said: “Even at the levels we used, which were lower than safe maximums set by environmental regulators, the overall numbers of parasitic insects still fell. This is a worrying result as many sustainable farming practices rely on natural pest control to keep aphids and other unwelcome creatures away from valuable crops.

“Diesel and ozone appear to make it more difficult for the wasps to find aphids to prey upon and so the wasp population would drop over time.”

Fortunately, this study has two bits of good news. The first, which is more an implication, is that efforts to decrease air pollution – which are already necessary for other reasons – will increase the effectiveness of wasp-based pest control. The other is that this doesn’t seem to be a problem for all of the wasps:

While the majority of parasitic wasp species decreased in polluted environments, one species of parasitic wasp appeared to do better when both diesel and ozone were present. However, the researchers found that this combination of pollutants also correlated with changes in the plants that might explain the finding.

With both pollutants present, oilseed rape plants produced more of the compounds that give brassica family crops, including mustards and cabbages, their distinctive bitter, hot and peppery flavour notes. These usually repel insects but in the case of Diaretiella rapae wasps, there was greater abundance and reproductive success associated with diesel exhaust and ozone together.

Dr Ryalls said: “Diaretiella rapae particularly likes to prey on cabbage aphids, which love to eat brassica crops.

“We know that some of the flavour and smell compounds in oilseed rape are converted into substances that do attract D.rapae. So, we could speculate that the stronger smell attracts the wasps and they are more successful in finding and preying upon aphids, that way. It could be that D.rapae is a good choice for pest control in diesel and ozone polluted areas.

“This really goes to show that the only way to predict and mitigate the impacts of air pollutants is to study whole systems.”

As transport shifts away from diesel and towards electric motors, air pollution will change. Knowing how pest-regulation service providers, such as parasitic wasps, respond to these progressive changes, will be essential to planning mitigation strategies to ensure sustainable food security now, and in the future. This research shows that we also must consider the impact of pollution on the plants, wasps, and prey insects, and the interactions between all three.

I think this last point is an important one to end on. In building a better society, we’re not looking to abandon technology. That means, as I’ve said before, that we will keep engaging in resource extraction that is destructive to the environment, and we will keep creating poisonous industrial byproducts. Our project, at this stage, is one of changing which pollutants we create most, and how we manage them. Creating an economic system that does not require infinite growth will help reduce all pollutants, but we will still have to contend with that which is unavoidable. That means that, unlike the present arrangement, we will need to actually clean up the messes we make through industry, just as we do with human waste. In that case, the time and energy put into sewage treatment helps everyone by making the world more pleasant to live in, and by reducing disease outbreaks. Getting a better handle on industrial pollution will yield similar results.

Healthy ecosystems that are beneficial to humans, like food forests and other “edible ecosystems”, is a goal worth working towards, but it’s not something that’s likely to work if don’t actually commit to it. Rising temperatures, pollution, and direct habitat destruction currently keep that future out of reach, which is why it’s so important to maintain a holistic perspective on the situation.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: How plate tectonics gave us seahorses

It’s a question that haunts all of us. It creeps into our minds as we try to fall asleep. It lingers in our minds, sapping attention away from life-changing events.

Whence seahorses?

How did such creatures come to be, and why do they seem to exist everywhere? Are seahorses the proof of supernatural creation that we’ve been looking for all this time? Will I have to give up my atheism for them? Only time will tell, but for now, here’s a video on seahorse evolution, and how it was influenced by the movement of the continents.

It’s not just the flooding: Hurricanes as heat pumps

While I don’t know a whole lot about the demographics of my readership, I’m going to assume that most of you have at least a passing familiarity with the water cycle. Maybe it’s just me, but when I learned about it as a kid, I learned about it as a description of the movement of water around the surface of the planet. The water cycle is about water. Straightforward, yes?

Then, a few years ago, I was writing a climate science lesson, and I had a minor revelation. The water cycle also describes the movement of energy in our atmosphere. When water evaporates, it effectively absorbs the heat required to keep it in a gaseous state. That cools off the place where the evaporation happens, which is why our own ability to regulate our temperatures relies heavily on evaporation. So now you have that water vapor, kept in that state by a combination of temperature and pressure. It rises up, and after a certain point reaches a low enough pressure and temperature to condense, which turns it into water droplets (clouds, rain, mist, etc), and warms up the air around them. That heat was just transported, as water vapor, from one part of the world to another. Of course, that same bit of water might absorb and release heat like that many times over before it falls back to the ground. If you watch clouds for long enough, on a mostly clear day, you can see some of them forming, or even some that fade in and out of existence as they move through pressure gradients shifting from gas to droplets, and back to gas again.

As I said, this may all be obvious to you, but for some reason it never really clicked in my head until I was actually studying the movement of heat energy in our atmosphere. From that perspective, when enough water fell on Pakistan to submerge one third of the entire country, a huge amount of heat was released into the air above. It’s been interesting to think about, but I couldn’t begin to tell you what predictive value that has for our day to day lives. It could mean that we should expect heat to follow flooding, but if the air warmed is pretty high up to begin with, would that follow? Further, all that water starts evaporating again, sucking up more heat. Fortunately, the world need not wait for people like me to puzzle this stuff out. A team out of Arizona has  found that when a tropical cyclone hits a city, it causes a spike in temperature in the days that follow. 

Three days after Hurricane Fiona struck Puerto Rico in mid-September, the National Weather Service issued an extreme heat advisory, warning that the heat index – which incorporates humidity to calculate perceived temperature – could reach up to 109 degrees.

Above-average temperatures almost always follow tropical cyclones – which by definition include tropical storms and hurricanes – and may soar to nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average, according to a new University of Arizona-led study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. The study’s authors stressed that their results are likely conservative estimates of just how high temperatures can climb following a cyclone.

Tropical cyclones often cause damage from strong winds, storm surges, intense rain and flooding, but extreme heat is an additional hazard, the researchers found. Above-average temperatures can occur days later and even in nearby areas that were not directly impacted by the storm.

“Multiple extreme events happening within a very short window of time can complicate disaster recovery,” said lead study author Zackry Guido, an assistant research professor in the university’s School of Natural Resources and Environment and the Arizona Institutes for Resilience: Solutions for Environment and Societies, or AIRES. “To medical providers, heat is a concern. Our results suggest that tropical cyclone preparedness should also include public information about heat risk.”

The research team analyzed 53 tropical cyclones in the eastern Caribbean between 1991 and 2020 and 205 interactions between the cyclones and 14 Caribbean cities. They found that the cities’ heat index values were always warmer than average after the storm.

“Everyone’s focus is on the destructive power of tropical storms and hurricanes – the storm surge, winds, flooding – and that’s obviously quite substantial, but our focus is on the combined hazard of storm and subsequent heat,” Guido said. “Hurricanes are massive heat pumps, redistributing heat for a large spatial distance around the center of the storm, and they leave massive destruction in their wake that can knock out the energy grid. That combination is often dangerous because it slows recovery and poses risks to human health.”

While the paper doesn’t explore how climate change may be impacting the phenomenon, the authors expect that high heat index values following tropical cyclones will increase in the future.

“It’s very easy to understand the climate change impacts of this,” Guido said. “Our future will likely have hurricanes dropping more intense rain and have more people in harm’s way. Then, if you drape on top of that a hotter environment, you will therefore expect a greater overall impact.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. The proportion of tropical cyclones that become hurricanes or typhoons is increasing in part because weaker ones are being cut off by increased wind shear, and in part because the oceans are warming so rapidly. The strength of the storm generally ties directly to sea surface temperatures, which means that the amount of heat that that storm pumps into an area is also going to go up.

In terms of impacts, a big storm like that means that in addition to the heat dumped, there’s also an increase in humidity (the other factor in the heat index). That means a higher chance of hitting “wet bulb” conditions, in which people can die fast without artificial cooling. Losing power – as so often happens – becomes that much more dangerous. At the same time, floods can contaminate the water supply, which could leave those trying to survive with a choice between lethal dehydration or drinking water that will probably make them sick.

I get why the water cycle wasn’t taught to me as a way that heat moves around in the atmosphere, but it seems that that’s a perspective we’ll need to keep in mind going forward.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Forget faith, it’s climate change that’s moving mountains.

Global warming means more extreme weather. By now this is pretty well-established, and we’ve had a look at the implications of that with the increase in droughts, fires, powerful hurricanes, floods, and so on. What does that mean for the landscape around us? Droughts tend to make a place more vulnerable to flooding and erosion, for example, because they kill off the plants that would otherwise stabilize the soil and absorb water during a storm. When it comes to mountains, the main prediction I’ve heard is that they’ll dry up, both from losing seasonal and multi-year snow and ice, and also from warming-fueled increases in both evaporation and transpiration. Beyond that, I hadn’t really thought about it a whole lot. Thankfully, a team of researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand have been thinking about it, and their research has some warnings that we’d do well to heed going forward:

Under the threat of climate change, mountain landscapes all over the world have the risk of becoming more hazardous to communities surrounding them, while their accelerated evolution may bring further environmental risks to surrounding areas.

This is according to a scientist from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, who, on the eve of the COP27 climate meeting, highlights the sensitivity of mountains to global climate change in a new study. Professor Jasper Knight, from the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at Wits University shows how complex mountain systems respond in very different and sometimes unexpected ways to climate change, and how these responses can affect mountain landscapes and communities.

“Worldwide, mountain glaciers are in retreat because of global warming and this is causing impacts on mountain landforms, ecosystems and people. However, these impacts are highly variable. The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) treats all mountains as equally sensitive and responding in the same way to climate change. However, this approach is not correct,” says Knight.

“Mountains with snow and ice work completely differently to low-latitude mountains where snow and ice are generally absent. This determines how they respond to climate and what future patterns of mountain landscape evolution we can expect.”

[…]

The research also shows how climate change will negatively impact on mountain landscapes and human activity. This includes an increasing risk of hazards such as avalanches, river floods, landslides, debris flows and lake outburst floods. These are made worse because of glacier retreat and permafrost warming. Alpine ecosystems and endemic species are already threatened with local extinction and mountain slopes are becoming greener as lowland forests spread to higher altitudes.

“As snow and ice shrink, mountain land surfaces are getting darker and this dramatically changes their heat balance, meaning they are warming up faster than the areas around them. Therefore, climate change impacts are bigger on mountains than they are anywhere else. This is a real problem, not just for mountains but also for the areas around them,” says Knight.

[…]

“Despite not having significant snow or ice, African mountains are also vulnerable. Our work on climate and landscape change and human adaptations in the Maloti–Drakensberg shows how mountains and people are connected together, and these are also threatened. Understanding these connections can help us better protect them against the worst impacts of climate change,” says Knight.

It seems that as the climate becomes less stable, so does the earth under our feet, which is less than comforting. I remember, a while back, when nobody I knew was particularly worried about global warming causing earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. I don’t know if my perception was accurate, or born of ignorance, but at this point I’m of the belief that global warming will cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, if it has not done so already. There’s simply too much mass moving around for it to not occasionally tip the balance. Maybe it will only changing the timing of an earthquake that would have happened anyway, but I honestly expect more than that. We’ve seen how things like fracking can cause earthquakes without the presence of a fault line, and when you consider the amount of weight that’s shifted during a mudslide, landslide. or avalanche, it seems reasonable to me that that could introduce new pressures to the landscape. If those events start happening regularly in a given area, either because of changes in precipitation, or because of melting ice, it seems like that would have to cause something eventually, similar to how glacial retreat has been linked to earthquakes.

Of course, I’m not breaking any new ground here, as this Guardian article from 2016 demonstrates:

In a similar vein, it seems that the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, may also be linked to earthquakes. The University of Miami’s Shimon Wdowinski has noticed that in some parts of the tropics – Taiwan included – large earthquakes have a tendency to follow exceptionally wet hurricanes or typhoons, most notably the devastating quake that took up to 220,000 lives in Haiti in 2010. It is possible that floodwaters are lubricating fault planes, but Wdowinski has another explanation. He thinks that the erosion of landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight on any fault below, allowing it to move more easily.

It has been known for some time that rainfall also influences the pattern of earthquake activity in the Himalayas, where the 2015 Nepal earthquake took close to 9,000 lives, and where the threat of future devastating quakes is very high. During the summer monsoon season, prodigious quantities of rain soak into the lowlands of the Indo-Gangetic plain, immediately to the south of the mountain range, which then slowly drains away over the next few months. This annual rainwater loading and unloading of the crust is mirrored by the level of earthquake activity, which is significantly lower during the summer months than during the winter.

And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano. Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.

As I like to say, we should be viewing this as though we’re trying to survive on a partially terraformed alien planet. We need to avoid danger zones, relocate when an area becomes hostile, and build with the expectation that the planet is going to to make things harder. I don’t think this means that everywhere is now in danger of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that activity will change where it currently exists, and not out of the question that we might get some new activity. The frightening truth is that the world isn’t as stable as we once thought.

“The land is all too shallow
It is painted on the sky
And trembles like the wind-shook rain
When the Raven King passed by”
-Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: The Insect Tier List

After yesterday’s post, I figured we could use something about insects that’s not all doom and gloom. These tier lists are very much made from a gamer’s perspective (in case that wasn’t obvious), so assignments of value tend to be based on things that translate well to games, so I wouldn’t call this “education”, precisely, but it’s a fun look at an assortment of insect “play styles”.

Scientists give a grim warning on climate change and insect populations

I talk a lot about the need for a climate response that’s centered around ecosystem resilience. Our best defense against the existential crises that face us is to not only stop the destruction of ecosystems, but also to actively work to build them up. The problem is, the longer we take to accomplish the first half of that plan, the harder it will be to carry out the second half. We have a much, much better chance of success if we’re helping struggling, but extant ecosystems survive, than if we’re trying to build up new ones from what’s left after total collapse.

The problem is, we seem to be getting pretty close to the “total collapse” stage. Even without climate change, ecosystems around the world are suffering from chemical pollution, and for a while now pesticides have been the prime suspect in the ongoing decline in insects (PZ did a good post on that recently). We’ve always known that climate change would be rough for many insect species, but it now we’ve got a pretty stark warning. 70 entimologists have cosigned a letter warning that climate change threatens to push us into the “total collapse” scenario, through its effects on insects alone:

In a new scientific review, a team of 70 scientists from 19 countries warned that if no steps are taken to shield insects from the consequences of climate change, it will “drastically reduce our ability to build a sustainable future based on healthy, functional ecosystems.”

Citing research from around the world, the team painted a bleak picture of the short- and long-term effects of climate change on insects, many of which have been in a state of decline for decades. Global warming and extreme weather events are already threatening some insects with extinction—and it will only get worse if current trends continue, scientists say. Some insects will be forced to move to cooler climes to survive, while others will face impacts to their fertility, life cycle and interactions with other species.

Such drastic disruptions to ecosystems could ultimately come back to bite people, explained Anahí Espíndola, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and one of the paper’s co-authors.

“We need to realize, as humans, that we are one species out of millions of species, and there’s no reason for us to assume that we’re never going to go extinct,” Espíndola said. “These changes to insects can affect our species in pretty drastic ways.”

Bees are probably the most well-known example of this right now, as they’re famous as pollinators, but there are many other insects that not only pollinate plants, but do a variety of things that, as part of a health ecosystem, make our own lives possible. As the paper explains, the process of responding to climate change as a population – range shifts, body changes, and behavior changes – is one that by necessity puts a strain on those populations, and makes them more vulnerable. Unfortunately, the other well-known problem with climate change and bugs is that some species seem to be fine with the change, and because we cannot catch a break, those seem to be the ones that cause us problems:

On the other hand, climate change may make some insects more pervasive—to the detriment of human health and agriculture. Global warming is expected to expand the geographical range of some disease vectors (such as mosquitoes) and crop-eating pests.

“Many pests are actually pretty generalist, so that means they are able to feed on many different types of plants,” Espíndola said. “And those are the insects that—based on the data—seem to be the least negatively affected by climate change.”

The concern about crop-eating pests is a small part of why I lean so hard on the idea of moving food production indoors. We’ll have enough trouble dealing with war, drought, heat, floods, and so on, without adding in more locust swarms. An added benefit of that would be less exposure to mosquitoes, ticks and the like for farm workers, and less exposure to, and use of pesticides.

When I have bad news to share – which seems like most days – I try to redirect focus to ways people can do something about the systemic problems dragging us towards extinction, and thankfully the authors of this warning do have a pretty clear action plan:

Though these effects are already being felt by insects, it is not too late to take action. The paper outlined steps that policymakers and the public can take to protect insects and their habitats. Scientists recommended “transformative action” in six areas: phasing out fossil fuels, curbing air pollutants, restoring and permanently protecting ecosystems, promoting mostly plant-based diets, moving towards a circular economy and stabilizing the global human population.

The paper’s lead author, Jeffrey Harvey of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said in a statement that urgent action is needed to protect insects and the ecosystems they support.

“Insects are tough little critters, and we should be relieved that there is still room to correct our mistakes,” Harvey said. “We really need to enact policies to stabilize the global climate. In the meantime, at both government and individual levels, we can all pitch in and make urban and rural landscapes more insect-friendly.”

The paper suggested ways that individuals can help, including managing public, private or urban gardens and other green spaces in a more ecologically-friendly way—for instance, incorporating native plants into the mix and avoiding pesticides and significant changes in land usage when possible.

Espíndola also stressed the value of encouraging neighbors, friends and family to take similar steps, explaining that it’s an easy yet effective way to amplify one’s impact.

“It is true that these small actions are very powerful,” Espíndola said. “They are even more powerful when they are not isolated.”

As with the rest of our environmental problems, while it’s good to know how we can work to fix them, that knowledge will not help us without building the power for political change. Do what you can – I’m actually going to set up that pollinator garden this spring – but part of helping save the insects (and ourselves) is building collective power, so that we can create revolutionary systemic change.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Tegan Tuesday: When online mobs turn wholesome

There’s a lot going on this week in personal life, in the wider world, and in the internet world. So I thought I’d share a heartwarming story from tumblr. I’ve been a tumblr user since 2012 or so, as has probably been obvious by the amount of tumblr threads that I’ve shared, and it is a very specific culture. A lot of it is silly, a lot of it is incredibly intelligent, and most of it is anonymous.

On October 27th, tumblr user Aquila Calvitium posted this:

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/699296989413785600/okay-fuck-it-if-this-post-reaches-666k-notes-by

This user had never had a text post of theirs get more than a dozen notes, so betting against almost 700,000 notes felt like a sure bet and a funny little joke amongst their friends. Unfortunately for Aquila Calvitium, tumblr loves a challenge. The first several thousand notes were simply people reblogging the post with the air of ‘haha sucker! We’ll fix you!’ Tumblr user LizLuvsCupcakes stated the general vibe:

Well, OP, I’m officially invested in this shit. Your whiny ass is doing self care if I have to drive to your goddamn house and do it for you.

By October 30th, Aquila Calvitium had moved the deadline to the end of 2022. This still seemed like an unachievable goal.

Then after a discussion about throwing an osage orange at OP between users Headspace-Hotel and TheLeakyPen, user LaineysBucketList offered a gamechanging idea:

We should just fill this post with other interesting things as reasons to reblog it.

Within the versions of this post I’ve seen discussions of hagfish slime used as an egg white substitute; infodumping about beryls; the axial tilt of Venus; and many other interesting random facts from the interesting and random users of tumblr. This collection of smart people with wildly different interests posting informally and anonymously is one of the reasons why I still love tumblr. It’s where academics (formal and informal) go to infodump.

Another update from OP happened on November 4th.

I was going to wait until y’all hit the mark, But I feel like I should say this now
When I made this post, it was supposed to be a joke
I mean, none of my posts ever get more than 20 notes if I’m lucky, so what are the odds of one reaching 666k? Impossible, haha
But then, something happened, something I didn’t expect
People actually began to… like it? And… reblog? And comment?
Before I knew it, my notifications were swarmed with comments after comments after reblogs after comments all on this one post
Then, still in the mindset of this being a joke, I realised I’d made the goal too easy, so I upped the stakes
But… the notes just got more frequent from there
And it started to hit me just what was happening

[Editor’s note: there are inserted screenshots of comments like “i Will reblog this every time i see this. you WILL do self care op,” “how does nihilism still exist. when tens of thousand of people can band together to make a stranger take care of themself,” and “get self care’d idiot <3.”]

For a while, I was overwhelmed with a feeling
A feeling I wasn’t used to
It was like… all of a sudden… I mattered…
My existance was actually noteworthy
People actually… cared?
It wasn’t a game anymore, it was a race to assure a stranger on the Internet that they were actually worth something
Hundreds of people all gathering in one online place to help out
Leaving messages and well wishes
Making me smile
Making me laugh
Funny comments
Jokes
Fun facts
Even simple comments
It all suddenly felt so real
This was never a joke to you
This was important
And I won’t let any of that go in vain
So… stay tuned I suppose
I’ll look after myself, and I’ll post proof of it too
I’ll catalogue every time I put my health first
Physical and mental
I’ll acknowledge my bad days and celebrate my good days
But most of all
I won’t forget this
Any of this
Ever

I am happy to report that today, November 8th, 2022, was the first day of self-care for the original poster. Yesterday, a mere eleven days after the first post, we went over 666,000 notes. As of writing, there are over 697k. Here is OP’s first post about self care.

https://aquilacalvitium.tumblr.com/post/700357376093667329/starting-today-on-the-8th-of-november-2022-the

Aquila Calvitium, who normally has problems eating properly, made themselves a sandwich and hung out with their family. Three cheers to OP! I hope their sandwich was tasty and that their beginning steps for self care and self maintenance take off. And if the news you see in the world is cold and unfeeling, remember how thousands of anonymous people pulled together to convince a stranger that their life matters. The world can be a wonderful place, if we let ourselves see it.

Video: John Oliver on election subversion, and why you should vote

Remember back when Trump got elected? There was a torrent of articles on surviving under authoritarianism, and how to fight back against its creep in your day to day life, but while most of the stuff on that list has happened, and continues to happen, it doesn’t seem like we’ve done very well at fighting back. It’s not that nothing has been done. Biden, for all his many, many flaws, has been better than Trump and the GOP in a number of ways, and it’s fine to feel good about that.

But it’s also the fact that the far right has near-total control over the judicial branch of the U.S. government, and they have been escalating their rhetoric and their efforts to destroy what remains of U.S. democracy. More than that, they are now being very open about their intentions, and they are specifically aiming to take over the positions of power that blocked the GOP’s attempted coup in 2021.

As he said, learn what’s happening in your local elections, and vote. It won’t solve the problem, but it can give more time to solve the problem, and it can keep anti-democracy fanatics from gaining the power they need to crush democracy and have the cops defend them while they do it. And then think about the kinds of things you can do that go beyond voting. By now it should be clear to everyone that the system we have is incapable of defending even the false democracy of the U.S.. It’s down to the people to build democracy and defend it, and it seems like that requires far more active participation than what’s normalized in a representative democracy.

Data on the economic toll of heat waves underscore the need to prioritize climate justice.

A few days ago, I wrote about how the increasing damage from powerful hurricanes is on track to being more than the U.S. economy can absorb. Unfortunately, it’s not just hurricanes, and it’s not jut the U.S. Since the 1990s, the global economy has lost 16 trillion dollars due to the various effects of heat waves:

Geography professor Justin Mankin and doctoral candidate Christopher Callahan, Guarini ’23, combined newly available, in-depth economic data for regions worldwide with the average temperature for the hottest five-day period—a commonly used measurement of heat intensity—for each region in each year. They found that from 1992 to 2013, heat waves statistically coincided with variations in economic growth and that an estimated $16 trillion was lost to the effects of high temperatures on human health, productivity, and agricultural output.

The findings stress the immediate need for policies and technologies that protect people during the hottest days of the year, particularly in the tropics and the Global South where the world’s warmest and most economically vulnerable nations are located, the researchers report.

“Accelerating adaptation measures within the hottest period of each year would deliver economic benefits now,” says Callahan, who is the study’s first author. “The amount of money spent on adaptation measures should not be assessed just on the price tag of those measures, but relative to the cost of doing nothing. Our research identifies a substantial price tag to not doing anything.”

The study, “Globally Unequal Effect of Extreme Heat on Economic Growth,” is the among the first to specifically examine how heat waves affect economic output, says Mankin, the study’s senior author and an assistant professor of geography. “No one has shown an independent fingerprint for extreme heat and the intensity of that heat’s impact on economic growth. The true costs of climate change are far higher than we’ve calculated so far.”

Dishonest actors sometimes point to deaths due to cold as a reason why we shouldn’t be worrying about climate change, but that argument ignores several factors. The first, of course, is that we are at the beginning of this warming event. While we can see a great deal of measurable change already, the sheer scale of what is happening makes it hard to remember that it’s actively getting worse. The second is that a lot of those deaths are due to the same economic system that has destabilized our climate. Lack of shelter, lack of adequate heat, and lack of adequate medical care all combine to make people far more vulnerable to all sorts of weather conditions, and the sad reality is that someone can die of hypothermia in pretty “warm” conditions.

Beyond that, there’s also the simple fact that we are a species that evolved on a cold planet. Our history has been hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages, and warmer inter-glacial periods, like the one we’ve been in for the last few millennia. We have many more tools for keeping ourselves warm than we have for cooling off. Deaths due to cold, would be pretty easy and cheap to prevent, but as a society we don’t value life very much.

And, of course, the statistics for cold deaths tend to focus on fairly wealthy countries that have harsh winters, and that choose to maintain a certain level of poverty, “for the economy. The growing problem of heatwaves is not only global, but is predictably hitting poorer countries harder:

“Our work shows that no place is well adapted to our current climate,” Mankin says. “The regions with the lowest incomes globally are the ones that suffer most from these extreme heat events. As climate change increases the magnitude of extreme heat, it’s a fair expectation that those costs will continue to accumulate.”

[…]

The study results underscore issues of climate justice and inequality, Mankin says. The economic costs of extreme heat—as well as the expense of adaptation—have been and will be disproportionately borne by the world’s poorest nations in the tropics and the Global South. Most of these countries have contributed the least to climate change.

The researchers found that while economic losses due to extreme heat events averaged 1.5% of gross domestic product per capita for the world’s wealthiest regions, low-income regions suffered a loss of 6.7% of GDP per capita.

Furthermore, the study revealed that to a certain point, wealthy subnational regions in Europe and North America—which are among the world’s biggest carbon emitters—could theoretically benefit economically by having periods of warmer days. The economies of other principal emitters such as China and India would be harmed by a greater intensity of extreme heat events given their regional baseline temperatures, the researchers found.

“We have a situation where the people causing global warming and changes in extreme heat have more resources to be resilient to those changes, and, in some rare cases, could benefit from it,” Mankin says. “It’s a massive international wealth transfer from the poorest countries in the world to the richest countries in the world through climate change—and that transfer needs to be reversed.”

 That last sentence could easily describe much of the last couple centuries of global politics and economics. It also follows what seems like an increasingly open hatred of anyone who’s struggling, and a belief that such people should be punished for their misfortune. It feels like a very superstitious, Calvinistic perspective – that those at the bottom are suffering because they deserve to be suffering, and therefor we should punish them for the sins they must have committed to be so cursed by God/The Free Market. That’s where we see people waving away a housing-first approach to homelessness, because of vague assertions about drug use or the preferences of people without adequate shelter, in my opinion. While it may not be unique to United States, it feels like a very USian outlook on life, and the flip side to the prosperity gospel that infuses that country’s culture.

And after a certain point, it’s hard not to see this as white supremacist eugenics at work in the climate denial movement, especially when you look at the other political projects funded by fossil fuel corporations and their owners.

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